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Why is the US military budget so large?
Daedalus
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The entire combined world's yearly military budget for 2008 is 1.47 trillion dollars, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The FY2009 United States military budget is $651 billion.
For reference, China is coming in second place at $70 billion for FY2009.
What the fuck?
Look, I realize I might be preaching to the choir here. But is there any reason whatsoever that our military budget is 1) almost half of the entire world's military expenditures, and 2) nearly ten times that of our nearest "rival"? (as if there's any chance of us entering war with China anyway).
And what do we get for our money, anyway? We can barely even hold Iraq. Iraq, whose pre-OIF military budget was the sort of sum that a rich person in this country uses to pay for a nice dinner. Our biggest foreign threats right now are (supposedly) North Korea and Iran, whose combined military budgets for this year are around 11 billion. Combined.
The people doling out money to our military (and deciding what projects get funded and by how much) are still fighting the goddamn Cold War in their heads. Even adjusted for inflation, we're spending more now than we did when Reagan was trying to sink the USSR by outspending them back in the eighties. And we're still spending the money on a bunch of bullshit like we're planning on fighting a prolonged tank battle through East Germany. How many billions of dollars have we spent on the F-22 Raptor, the "next-generation air superiority fighter"? ($63 billion, if you're wondering.) At least Obama's planning to kill off that fucker, but why did it take eighteen years for someone to wake up and say "hey, now that the Soviets aren't around, who the hell are we going to contest air superiority with?"
And hey, it doesn't stop at the Air Force. We have eleven aircraft carriers in service. I'm talking about the full-size Nimitz-class ones, here; I'm not even counting counting the little Wasp-class ships that can only carry helicopters and Harriers. We have eleven in service, and we're in the process of building one more. There are ten aircraft carriers in service that do not belong to the US. In the entire world. And if we're going to be perfectly honest here, only two of those ten (the French Charles de Gaulle and the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov) are anywhere near the size of our carriers, the remaining eight are limited to VTOL craft, like the additional eleven Wasp- and Tarawa-class ships the US has that I didn't even count toward our total.
What the hell are we doing? The US military here is tilting at windmills, gearing up for a fight with an enemy that doesn't even exist. The USSR is gone, and China is one of our biggest trading partners. Besides, any war between superpowers will begin and end with an exchange of nuclear missiles anyway. Is it really necessary to spend this much fucking money on the military?
The FY2009 United States military budget is $651 billion.
For reference, China is coming in second place at $70 billion for FY2009.
What the fuck?
Look, I realize I might be preaching to the choir here. But is there any reason whatsoever that our military budget is 1) almost half of the entire world's military expenditures, and 2) nearly ten times that of our nearest "rival"? (as if there's any chance of us entering war with China anyway).
And what do we get for our money, anyway? We can barely even hold Iraq. Iraq, whose pre-OIF military budget was the sort of sum that a rich person in this country uses to pay for a nice dinner. Our biggest foreign threats right now are (supposedly) North Korea and Iran, whose combined military budgets for this year are around 11 billion. Combined.
The people doling out money to our military (and deciding what projects get funded and by how much) are still fighting the goddamn Cold War in their heads. Even adjusted for inflation, we're spending more now than we did when Reagan was trying to sink the USSR by outspending them back in the eighties. And we're still spending the money on a bunch of bullshit like we're planning on fighting a prolonged tank battle through East Germany. How many billions of dollars have we spent on the F-22 Raptor, the "next-generation air superiority fighter"? ($63 billion, if you're wondering.) At least Obama's planning to kill off that fucker, but why did it take eighteen years for someone to wake up and say "hey, now that the Soviets aren't around, who the hell are we going to contest air superiority with?"
And hey, it doesn't stop at the Air Force. We have eleven aircraft carriers in service. I'm talking about the full-size Nimitz-class ones, here; I'm not even counting counting the little Wasp-class ships that can only carry helicopters and Harriers. We have eleven in service, and we're in the process of building one more. There are ten aircraft carriers in service that do not belong to the US. In the entire world. And if we're going to be perfectly honest here, only two of those ten (the French Charles de Gaulle and the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov) are anywhere near the size of our carriers, the remaining eight are limited to VTOL craft, like the additional eleven Wasp- and Tarawa-class ships the US has that I didn't even count toward our total.
What the hell are we doing? The US military here is tilting at windmills, gearing up for a fight with an enemy that doesn't even exist. The USSR is gone, and China is one of our biggest trading partners. Besides, any war between superpowers will begin and end with an exchange of nuclear missiles anyway. Is it really necessary to spend this much fucking money on the military?
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Beyond that, we are pretty much at the forefront of military technology. We create some bad-ass stuff.
Beyond that, we grossly overpay most of our contractors and allow them to run over-budget willy-nilly.
All that taken together makes running our military expensive.
Of course, you may argue that we don't need awesome, state-of-the-art stuff. I would disagree. (Though I would agree that much of the awesome stuff we make is unnecessary or misguided - see also: ABM shield.)
You may also argue we don't need to be able to wage two wars at once. Here, I would agree.
The US navy, though, patrols the worlds sea's and act as a global police force on international waters, I think we could do with shared expenses on that one though (a lot of countries are already sending patrols down by Somalia) but overall I'd like to see the whole world move away from millitary spending because it is highly unlikely the west is going to see a war for a longass time.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
I'm more than happy with sponsoring R&D of technologies, especially if those technologies eventually find a way into the commercial market, but the current environment reeks of irresponsibility.
You know, I don't buy that. If you take an amount of money from military-guided R&D, and put that same amount of money into civilian-oriented R&D, it'll have a greater effect on our quality of life and hey, maybe it can filter down to the military in a few years instead of the other way around.
I doubt anybody would argue with your point. The problem people have with military budgets, contractors & allocations is that they have become a synonym for inefficiency.
Also, a lot of money is wasted from military organizations because if they don't spend the money they're allotted for the year then they won't be allotted as much the next year. Whereas an organization might not need the money this year, there's a possibility that they'll need it next year, so in the end they spend money on useless shit that they don't need in order to keep their budget.
I'm not willing to say that the gov't spends too much on military spending because I don't have enough of an overall picture to do so. However, I will say that the money they do have is spent wastefully and the entire system needs an overhaul.
You compared our military to China's. Right now China is a regional military power. People they share a border with, they are a threat to. People a short sail away they can be a threat to. But places like Africa or Europe are well outside their ability to project force. The US military can attack anywhere.
The thing is, we don't even need the F-22. Ever since the end of the cold war, nobody has come remotely close to challenging our air superiority. The current platforms are perfectly capable of doing the job, the only downside being the age of the airplanes. You know how you fix that? Build new F-16s! The contractor (Lockheed-Martin, I believe) already knows how to make them, and you can build 4-5 of the damn things for the price of a single F-22.
The short answer is, defense spending has been a blank check for the Military-Industrial Complex to try out their expensive new toys ever since Eisenhower coined the term. It's a problem that has existed under the watch of both Democrats and Republicans, and it will take a lot more than one president to fix.
Mostly the second point though
Edit: Also, breaking down by seperate branches, some branches (Air Force) take far far more of the spending budget than is either reasonable or their fair share, and some (Army) have insanely wrongly-adjusted money allotted, and that shit is retarded. The fact that the Army still uses motherfucking M16A2s over the vastly superior M16A4 or M4 carbine is a fucking laughingstock when fucking Headquarters is able to carpet their buildings every year.
Take air superiority as an example. We have spent billions and billions of dollars pushing the time horizon further and further away in air conflict. We've gotten so good, that the moment our enemy starts fueling up planes, the pilots of those planes are already dead. We won't actually kill them for another 2-3 hours or so, but we know exactly when they will take off, as soon as they do we have them tracked on radar, and we can fire a missile from a fighter jet that is 80 miles away that the enemy doesn't even know is there. We don't necessarily NEED this capability, but it keeps American pilots alive, and also keeps troops on the ground alive.
The Navy actually is a large airforce on it's own.
Now debating if America should keep those power projection abilities is all very well, but comparing it with other countries is comparing McDonald's budget with that of a local diner - the latter doesn't have to maintain an international presence.
I'm aware, they can handle pure fighters.
On the plus side, it keeps sounding like Obama and Gates are going to make that attempt.
You know, that's another thing that pisses me off. It wouldn't bother me (well, it would still bother me, but not as much) if we would spend the money on the shit we actually need to fight the wars we're going to fight. It wasn't until fucking 2007 that the Army started to look into replacing the Humvee with something that can actually survive an ambush in a Baghdad street. I mean, what the fuck did they think was going to happen?
Body Armor is expensive, hell some screws on a B52 bomber costs up to $5, with thousands of those on the jet. That my not sound terrible but they are constantly getting replaced along with lots of other tiny parts on the jet. That is a bomber that was last produces in the early 60s, now imagine how much it costs to maintain an F22 for an entire year.
Do you personally know, or are you, a military leader in the US? If not then you have no idea what you are talking about. The way of thinking has been drastically changing and if you just look at some of the military propaganda or where some of the new technology is going you will see that.
I do think that some of the military spending can be cut, but it would not be feasible to cut it as much as some people think is possible.
Actually, there was an article in the Atlantic arguing that other countries are quickly achieving parity with the modern U.S. fighter. They have gotten very good at defeating many of our long-range capabilities through relatively inexpensive jamming technology.
Everyone involved in the military contracting world knows military funding will never do anything but stay static or go up, so they pretty much scam people who they think they can bribe with eventual scammy jobs later. Ohhh did my company have a habit of hiring newly retired officers of the bases they contracted on into executive or marketing roles.
Also, um, the Osprey.
Not that I actually see anywhere close to that much.
It'd be really fucking simple too
Executive Order whateverthefuck number: Any member of the military cannot work for any defense contractor in a lobbying capacity for X number of years (I'd say 10, but whatever) after getting discharged
A punchline all by itself, like Daikatana. Hey, I hear they recently fixed that little problem where the thing would, for no apparent reason, flip over and kill a dozen Marines. And it only took them, what, twenty-five years?
Oh Jesus I hope they don't do that. I already get enough shit for voting for Obama... I don't want that to start up yet again.
(Works for a government contractor making $17.50 an hour doing IT work... As a temporary part time)
I disagree, we're some of the best trained, best equipped, and most intelligent soldiers, on average, in the world
I mean yeah there's a lot of wasteful spending but we're pretty damn good at what we do and if shit were to go down you, and everyone else in this country would be pretty safe
Basically I'm saying I got your back :P
I think they're trying to avoid the collective shit fit that would cause and actually address the other problems with procurement, but yes.
But we're never going to war with any of those fucking countries! Is Iran coming to parity with with the modern U.S. fighter? No, they're running on some obsolete Vietnam-era MiGs and the essentially unmaintained F-14s we sold them back when they were run by a fascist dictator instead of a religious dictator.
Wars between superpowers just don't happen. The writing's been on the wall for fifty years. It doesn't matter if Russia or China has a fighter that can match ours, because we'll never get into a war with Russia or China, and if we ever do, it'll begin and end with ICBMs.
The F 117 was incredibly successful for many reasons, having a bomber that can sneak in like that to open the way for the rest of the air attacks is incredible. But the F 117 had many flaws and was incredibly expensive to maintain. The F22 is a cheaper, more reliable and much more advanced replacement.
Absolutely. I'd say that our military is the most trained in the world, but I don't think that money had anything to do with that. Especially not 10 times the amount China spent on military.